The purpose of this forum is to generate comments and discussion about entries for this year's VCAs. When recommending editors and AMVs, I'd encourage you to give some reasons as to why you think they deserve the prize (rather than just listing them without any explanation).

I know there's nothing stopping you from merely providing lists, but just a sentence or two elaborating on your choices can make people take a lot more notice of your recommendation. There are a lot of videos out there. What makes an AMV stand apart could be simple the fact that someone bothered to express their thoughts on why it should be recognized.

I've enabled the edit button in this forum for those of you who might want to add to your posts.

Not really. Most competent people realize this forum is just a giant circle jerk among friends. I mean does anyone really need to write "I'm putting this person because they are my friend" behind most of their posts?

...not to say there aren't legitimate recommendations, but let's be honest here people.

dwchang wrote:Not really. Most competent people realize this forum is just a giant circle jerk among friends. I mean does anyone really need to write "I'm putting this person because they are my friend" behind most of their posts?

...not to say there aren't legitimate recommendations, but let's be honest here people.

Not really. Most competent people realize this forum is just a giant circle jerk among friends. I mean does anyone really need to write "I'm putting this person because they are my friend" behind most of their posts?

...not to say there aren't legitimate recommendations, but let's be honest here people.

That's one of the most cynical and yet entirely accurate things I've seen posted on the org from someone other than me.

So are you going to just sit back and defer to that mentality, or will you actually do something to make things better?

angelx03 wrote:All in all, most the voters will be the lurkers who never posted or come to these forums (I wonder if they even go to this particular sub-forum).

I hope that some of them do wander in here eventually. And I would hope that when they do, they'd find something more than just topics full of lists and a load of cynicism.

Some people around here are always complaining that the rest of the community "doesn't understand" what makes a really good AMV or whatnot. Well, this is your chance to point out to them exactly what makes certain AMVs great. Nobody's gonna be convinced one way or another if you don't even try to give a reason.

Phade used to call this forum "Shameless VCA Promotions," and nobody was allowed to promote just their own videos. If circle jerking is the reality today, then it's practically the same thing as self-promotion. There's nothing shameless in recommending videos that you truly like, but if there's going to be a lack of discussion in the process then once again, it might as well be the same thing. It's up to you to actually help make this forum (and this entire community) useful.

If you don't want to help out, that's your call, but don't come around lamenting the state of the community when you've chosen to lounge around in cynicism instead of at least trying to improve things.

Actually I spent the whole day going through my backup DVDs of 2008 AMVs, making lists, posting in the threads and giving a bit of a personal comment about almost every video. It felt pretty good trying to care about the VCAs in some way again.

Writing longer reviews can really break your back though, I noticed that for some categories I just had to make a URL dump out of it because things started repeating and I didn't want to copypaste and apart from that I added videos that I myself didn't enjoy that much but gave them enough credit to think that others might wanna know about them and probably would vote for them. But for those I just couldn't say that much about them of course.

Mainly what I noticed was that there was a first swarm of replies and links and then everyone just added "x2" "x3" "x4" without themselves adding any other recommendations of their own. That's ok I guess but 80% of the thread? Huh. I think we have more than just 20 videos qualified and deserving of an award.